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Why all those 15,6inch note-netbooks, that is stretching brazos too much, with such a large size many users will expect more grunch, the LIano E series and A2 will be a much better APU for that. You could say that the 15,6 now will pack a verry healthy 10-12 hours online, but they don't they just put crappy and small batteries in there.

i agree, i think they are just trying to sucker people in with "the latest thing" mentality. Brazos was never designed with big screens or heavy mobile workloads in mind.it's supposed to be the AMD answer to Atom.

i would really like to only see these in little machines, and i would hope that any extra costs would be incurred because of 1. a quality display or 2. an SSD.

of course, most people will just go out and buy the newest thing, so HP's marketing department probably has the right idea here, but it's sad to me anyway.Reply

I think you guys are kind of missing the point. This is for extreme budget builds. Gateway has priced themselves out of that market a bit, but these things used to be running AMD single core V-series processors. Brazos is enough for Grandma Millie to visit YouTube and check her e-mail.Reply

Agree.So the consumers are idiots buying brazos on a 15.6? Well then most consumers are stupid. How convinient. They can not decide what is best for themselves, but the experts have to tell them that a 15.6 is to large for a brazos...

The fact, that better be learned now is, that brazos is perfectly fast for all ordinary task that 99% do. Better get used to it. If its a 10 or a 17" dont matter. Noise and battery life, and cost, is far more important than speed you dont need. The week link on the brazos machines is not the cpu but the hd. Next step is an ssd.Reply

there is something to be said for someone who needs a cheap laptop with a larger display, but this isn't cheap enough.and not just this one, but also the sony, the hp, and the msi that were reviewed recently, they are all out of our fictional grandma's price range.there is no need to push the uber-cheap entry laptop to the 450-650 range.you can call that math "a bit" out the ultra-budget if you want, but i would say over $350 is past it, certainly over $400 is.also, i do think there are many people likely to buy something in this price range that don't know the details of their cpu, and don't want to know.calling them idiots is taking it way too far.Reply

I mostly agree. I don't think the 15"+ form factor is the best application, but considering the only extra work to do is push extra pixels to a larger panel, the GPU on Fusion is far more capable than IGPs of the past assigned to the same task. Overall, you shouldn't notice a difference moving up to 15" from 11" with Fusion. The shame of it is, Brazos is much more capable than this, but I guess 15" class notebooks are the best sellers, so that's what we get.

Considering our home computer is an 15.4" Acer Timeline with a single core penryn at 1.3ghz paired with an Intel IGP, this has got to be faster. 90% of the time, our Timeline is fast enough, and we love the fact that it goes 6-7 hours on a charge. I just wish OEMs would pair a real battery with Brazos, so we could get 8 hours. THAT is what I'm looking for at 15.4"Reply

Has to do with components. It costs about as much to buy a 15" TFT screen, as a 10" lcd, because the market sells more 15" screens.

Gateway isn't particularly the best company, buying up last gen screens, hd's and batteries, to sell those laptops cheaper to the customers.

Most gateways are fraggin slow, due to bad choice of hardware, and some cease to exist after a year or two, due to breaking hardware.The amd Apu's are a piece of engineering work, and probably will not fail you; but I can't say that about the other parts of this laptop.Reply

I find 8 to 9 inch netbooks perfect! Especially as gaming console.I hear all these people crap about 9" being too small, but they never complain about their (MUCH SMALLER) Nintendo Gameboy, or DS, or PlayStation Portable, cellphones or GPS systems!

It are crappers like you that made companies go over to the bigger, more bulky models; which I don't think is an improvement at all!

I have no issues typing on a 9" keyboard; and I much prefer that over a 10" version!

9" fits in the inside of your jacket. Is good for thumb typing as well as regular typing.The screen size is perfect for a 1367*768 resolution because you keep those netbooks very close to your eyes anyways.

And it's size is just made for lower battery life! (smaller screen, less light is necessary from the backlight, smaller internals, smaller fan,...)Reply

If you think larger screen sizes always relates to power use, you probably are relatively young! With aging, eyesight often deteriorates and those small screens become cumbersome if not almost useless. Sure, larger screens cost more and many older folks are more price sensitive and thus can't afford them, but... I'd be hesitant to recommend anything but the largest sizes to anyone in their 60's and up. (I'm traveling at the moment, and I find even my sister's 17" lappy poses proiblems for my 64yo eyes.)Reply

I am older, but luckily have fairly good eyesight. The thing I dont like about the netbook size chasis is the small keyboard. I think the E350 APU is "fast enough" for a 15.6 in chasis. The only problem I see with these notebooks is that I think they are overpriced, unless they become available for quite a bit less than list. I am not sure I see any point to the C-50 platform in a notebook. It is barely faster than a smartphone or tablet.

Oh, I forgot, the other problem is that they are made by Gateway. My experience with Gateway products has been very poor. I bought one laptop from them and had to exhange it because it would not power up when taken brand new from the box. The replacement had several instances where it would not power up either, and eventually died after slightly more than a year.Reply

More than average? If by average you mean the old Core 2 Duo GMA 4500MHD, then yes, but the HD 6250 is generally slower than even Arrandale's IGP. More compatible, perhaps, but compatibility isn't all that useful when you're talking sub 20FPS. C-50 is fine for the AMD netbook alternatives (i.e. under $350 with Win7 Starter), and our forthcoming review suggests the C-50 is about 10% faster in single-core and 10% slower in multi-core compared to the Atom N550. You're still looking at a lot of compromises with any $350 netbook, though.Reply

18W Arrandale Celerons and Pentiums are anything but speed daemons. And that is the HIGH end.

On top of that once you include driver (in)quality into the mix, HD6250 ends up beaten only by HD6310 and (in games) by SB. Neither of which are actually competitors. 5 FPS in an OpenGL app is still incomparably better than blank screen...

Even the most basic C-30 will run almost anything you throw at it. Including say even Hyper-V. Not a single Intel's APU has such can-run capability.Reply

A 10" touchscreen, high end gorilla glass, vastly superior manufacturing and design, offset OS development costs. Building a super lightweight touchscreen tablet is a bit harder (ie more costly) than tweaking a reference motherboard design to fit in an mediocre quality case with a mediocre screen.

I have a grandparent looking for a dirt-cheap laptop that just needs to do web browsing, video and wordprocessing. I keep hearing that only someone working for Intel would buy their entry-level products over AMD's new APUs. But systems like these keep coming out priced at $450-500+. From all accounts the APUs are better than Atom but when I go to Best Buy they have a number of 15.6" laptops with 2 GHz+ Celeron and Pentium CPUs (not Atom) for <$400? Are the integrated graphics that much better?Reply

If you can actually find something with Pentium P6000 series or Celeron P4500/P4600 series for under $500, I can pretty much guarantee they'll beat up on Brazos. If you're looking at the older CULV Pentium/Celeron (SU4100, SU3500, or SU2300), then it's a different story. CULV chips are faster than E-350 on the CPU, but significantly worse on the IGP. What I'm curious to see is the new Celeron B810 can do, but 1.6GHz Sandy Bridge may not be particularly impressive, especially with a trimmed down IGP. Anyway, when I looked at my local Best Buy, there was a laptop with the Pentium P6100 going for $600 or so, and that's quite a bit more than the $450 for a decent Brazos laptop (i.e. HP dm1z).Reply

Online they have a Lenovo w/ 15.6" LED screen and a Pentium P6200 w/ Intel GMA HD integrated graphics for <$380. It looks like most of the other models (Gateway, Acer, HP, Dell, etc) are either T4500/P6xxx Pentiums w/ smaller screens (14", 13.3", etc), Celerons (I think they are 1C | 1T) or refurbished.

DX11 is generally useless outside of games where you have a system that's this slow. The one potential exception is the new GPU accelerated web browsers; I've put Firefox 4 on an E-350 and it scrolls nice and smooth with no CPU use to speak of. Of course, rendering the initial webpage is still a CPU limited (or network limited) process.

Anything in the Core 2 era is generally worse than Brazos, at least on the IGP side of things. I'd steer clear of T-series processors for that reason, but the P-series Pentium and Celerons are okay. They'll be the cheapest options with Intel chips. If you look at ark.intel.com, you can type in the various CPU model numbers and get the full details of what exactly is in the chip (with a few omissions, like sometimes it's not clear on Sandy Bridge parts if it's a 6EU or 12EU version).Reply

I can't prove anything to you but In my opinion yes it really would be better to get an E-350 APU because the GPU is better makes a lot more difference then most people seem to realize. While it is not a fast chip in any sense it strikes a very good balance for real useability in my experience. I have one being used as a simple HTPC and it just seems to be able to do anything I throw at it without complaint. The Intel systems have faster CPUs but you get not only a worse GPU but also Intel's drivers which are usually agreed to be worse then AMDs.Reply

Intel's drivers generally work well for mainstream games and video work, and with Arrandale they're pretty close in performance to the HD 6310 in many games (at least in part because E-350 isn't fast enough to feed the GPU). You can see the relative performance in some games in our last Brazos laptops review by looking at the Dell Latitude E6410 as a reference point:http://www.anandtech.com/show/4218/5

The interesting comparison will be Celeron B810, which has Sandy Bridge's improved IGP. Since the B810 will use the 6EU core, though, it won't be nearly as fast as the 12EU version found in the i3/i5/i7 mobile CPUs. If you're into esoteric video codecs, though, AMD or NVIDIA is likely the better route.Reply

No, that intel IGP are crappy. Obviously a i5 520M come with way more clockspeed for the cpu and if you want to look cpu-bound games suck as BC2. The reality is that any non SB IGP is crap vs Ontario/Zacate low end IGP's.

Please learn to comprehend before calling someone biased. "Generally work for mainstream games and video work" is what I said, and you are even more biased if you're going to try and pretend that Zacate is able to handle even a reasonable selection of modern games. I did a complete test of 23 games mostly from 5+ years ago in a recent review, and I'm working on running the same tests on Arrandale, SNB, Nile, Danube, and a few other platforms; I dare say I know what I'm talking about since I'm doing actually testing rather than just pulling the same old crap out of thin air.

When I say Intel's drivers are good enough for mainstream games, I absolutely mean that. That means stuff like Sims 3, Spore, and many other titles. I'd say overall you're looking at around 80% compatibility with a very wide selection of games. How many run well enough to be useful, though? Well, on SNB it's most titles, but Arrandale is half as fast as HD 3000, so it's probably around half of the current stuff. That said, Arrandale's drivers are basically the same as SNB's drivers, so give the "Intel IGP are crappy" rhetoric a rest for a change. Arrandale was about as fast as HD 4200, which is just as "crappy".Reply

Lolimaster obviously dont know what he is talking about. Last year the celeron 900 found its way into quite a few sub-$300 notebook deals. And that was a $70 chip. The celeron B810 is a bit more but it has a gpu. It should be faster than an E-350 and get somewhat comparable battery life. I predict that back-to-school sale $300 notebooks will be a battle between the B810 and the E-350. What I still dont get is how brazos notebooks are so expensive when the chip costs so much less. It is clear to me from looking at the atom that even when AMD charges about half for the same class chip, those cost savings simply are not passed on to the consumer. The volume on the intel designs is simply so large that the clearance deals are both more frequent and more of a discount.Reply

You have to factor in all the costs I suppose. Let's say $50 for the LCD, $100 for the chassis/power/motherboard, $50 for the RAM, and $50 for the storage. Then add in the cost of the actual CPU/APU and you're now at $325 to $350 I'd say.

Given I'm just estimating prices, some of the stuff may cost more than I guessed, so minimum pricing of around $400 for a 4GB Brazos E-350 is reasonable. But yeah, the $500+ stuff is definitely increasing profit margins a healthy amount (though not up to Apple levels at least).Reply

These laptops seem interesting when equipping them with an SSD, and a large cell/capacity battery!

But for 44Wh battery, only to get 4 hours of battery life, is really little.Atom netbooks go at least twice to trice as long on battery.Granted performance of this thing is better, but I really wished to see these apu's make an 8hour battery life possible!

I think that should be the next standard, 8hours for school, long flights, or commute, portable office...

Laptops with only 4 hours of battery are not really speaking to people!Reply

When is Gateway gonna release another laptop that offers a fantastic value like they did a year or so ago with that 17" model with with a 9800GTX GPU in it for about a grand?

I really want them to release a 15.6" model with a 1080p screen and GTX460 with Sandy Bridge for somewhere around a thousand dollars. I'm thinking like 1200. Cause I was very satisfied with the build quality and keyboard of that model and it was only around for a very short time. They really NEED to do that again.Reply

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